A hotel in Dubai welcomed the new year by breaking a world record and it’s amazing. It formed a pyramid with 54,740 champagne glasses, breaking the previous record by a comfortable 4,624 glasses, and that’s amazing too. It is now in the Guinness World Records, the bible of the insane where many find recognition: long-nailed, curly-mustard, and mixed freaks.
The temptation to stop when only one glass ahead would have been strong, yet the pyramid builders persevered. With only 4,623 glasses ahead, the risk of it collapsing would have been too strong. Then comes the role of fate, or, as Sting sang, the sacred geometry of chance.
Yet the pyramid builders persisted in this. It took five days, this exact task which, like so many of mankind’s efforts, is a wonderfully futile exercise.
Think of the game – pointless, this business of kicking a small ball into a tiny hole so many hundred meters away when you can so easily go up to it and drop it. Or cook gourmet food consisting of snails. Or everyone ignores making traffic signs.
Still, there is a boon in meaninglessness. Much life is purposeful, focused and full of importance, a path from A to B that has to be taken. You have to eat, you have to sleep, you have to fight with your neighbors.
But you don’t have to stack one glass on top of another until they reach a height of 27 feet. And that is its beauty, a beauty that is beyond mere sight. Perhaps that’s also the allure of the game – its futility is what makes it important; You do it, although you don’t have to.
It is pointless, and we feel that futility is embedded in our lives. On those 54,740 glasses an entire philosophy can be composed. But that too would be in vain. The cycle of futility overlaps with the cycle of life.
There is a danger though. Other hotels may be tempted to top the record books for a splurge. And they can’t say it with glasses. What is the world record for stacking guests one on top of the other? When this is established, we may have another hotel piling up another guests on top of recycled glasses from the original hotel pyramid. The next step is obvious: the guests were holding glasses while singing a specific song and reading the first book of Harry Potter and …
This ‘and’ is dangerous. You can always add something and set a unique world record, limited only by imagination and the availability of raw materials. The degree of futility also increases manifold.
If you have built castles in the air, Thoreau wrote, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be: now lay the foundations beneath them.
The bubbly glasses set up to 27 feet in the air must be a close relative of the palaces. You have to look for inspiration.
(Suresh Menon is the Contributing Editor, The Hindu).